2014 Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture: Bill Lann Lee

Date: January 27, 2014Location: Legal Research Center

Bill Lann Lee

Legal Research Center

Bill Lann Lee is a shareholder in the firm of Lewis, Feinberg, Lee, Renaker & Jackson, P.C., Oakland, California, where he specializes in prosecuting employment discrimination, disability access, and other civil rights class enforcement actions. Mr. Lee was the nation’s top civil rights prosecutor as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Justice from December 1997-January 2001.

Mr. Lee is a graduate of Columbia University Law School (1974) and Yale College (1971). After law school, he worked for a number of public interest law firms. He was for 17 years head of the Los Angeles office of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (the law firm founded by the late Justice Thurgood Marshall) from 1989-1997 and before then a lawyer in the Fund’s New York office (1974-83). At the Fund, Mr. Lee prosecuted employment discrimination, housing discrimination, school desegregation, police misconduct, transportation equity and environmental justice and other civil rights class enforcement actions. As pro bono counsel, he was an attorney at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York City in the 1979-80. Mr. Lee also worked for the Center for Law in the Public Interest in Los Angeles from 1983-88.

As Assistant Attorney General, Mr. Lee’s priorities were enforcement of federal statutes barring, hate crimes, housing and lending discrimination, disability discrimination and police misconduct. After his service in the Justice Department, he has prosecuted civil rights cases as a partner at Lewis Feinberg and at Lieff, Cabraser , Heimann & Bernstein, LLP, in San Francisco.